About 52 Lasers

One laser, fifty-two weeks

52 Lasers is a collaboration between Pixelaser and Isette, showcasing one new project per week created with an industrial laser engraving & cutting platform. The blog was born out of a need for an artistic challenge and a huge list of things we want to try, but never seem to get around to doing. Expect to see a variety of different uses for lasers here – the plan is to try new materials, make functional objects, try unusual artistic pieces, even document tests we’ve been meaning to do and feel would be helpful to the laser community at large. To that end, each week, we’ll select one thing from an ever-growing list of ideas and turn it into a finished project. Then we’ll take some pictures and write some things and share them with you here!

We are a husband (Ryan of Pixelaser) and wife (Jennifer of Isette) duo, but we definitely approach the laser with different backgrounds and goals in mind. Weekly projects are authored independently, so just look for the author’s name to find out whose project it was!

If you find yourself really interested in one of our weekly pieces, we can probably make one for you, too! Just get in touch via the contact form!

2 thoughts on “About 52 Lasers”

Lasers are very interesting. I ran metal cutting lasers for about 12 years. I have cut inconel, brass, copper,lead, rubber, styrofoam, cold steel, hot rolled steel, stainless steel, aluminum,acrylic, lexan,titanium and probably a few I missed along the way. For 10 years I worked in a plant that made knives. There I cut knife blanks, liners, handles and any other parts that were needed. I cut liner lock liners at a plus .ooo4/minus.oooo4 thousandths of an inch. It took some crafty programming to do that close of work. Plus, I did some etching with the laser.
The laser always intrigued me. It was also my duty to keep 3 lasers in top running order. This took several years to perfect that knowledge.

Bruce, it sounds like you got to operate much more powerful lasers than I work with! Both machines I operate on a daily basis are only 40w CO2 lasers; they can’t even mark most metals!

A lot of the lasers we see out in the field now are so simple there’s very little programming to do, but that’s probably enabled by not needing the kind of precision you’ve described. It’s so simple now you can just CTRL-P a document from Microsoft Word and it’ll engrave in wood if you really wanted to! I can’t promise the results would be great, though; that’s where experience comes in. 🙂